Critical Memory Leak: Claude Code Consumed 129GB RAM and Caused System Freeze

# Critical Memory Leak: Claude Code Consumed 129GB RAM and Caused System Freeze ## Summary Claude Code experienced a severe memory leak that consumed 129GB of virtual memory, exhausted all available system RAM (16GB), and caused a complete system freeze requiring a hard reboot. ## Environment - **Claude Code Version**: 2.0.36 - **OS**: Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS - **Kernel**: 6.14.0-35-generic - **Total RAM**: 16GB - **CPU**: 12 cores - **GPU**: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 ## Incident Details ### Timeline (from sysstat data) ``` 11:00:10 AM - Memory used: 11.17% (11 GB free) 11:10:08 AM - Memory used: 19.63% (8.5 GB free) 11:20:10 AM - Memory used: 55.87% (5.5 GB free) <- Rapid increase 11:30:10 AM - Memory used: 78.34% (1.1 GB free) <- Critical 11:33:16 AM - LINUX RESTART (complete system freeze) ``` Memory consumption increased from ~2GB to ~12GB in just 30 minutes, with no other resource-intensive applications running. ### Process Memory Statistics (Post-Restart) ``` Name: claude Pid: 3740 VmPeak: 135508316 kB (129 GB!) VmSize: 75721528 kB (72 GB) VmHWM: 569132 kB (556 MB peak resident) VmRSS: 425416 kB (415 MB current resident) VmData: 71003864 kB (68 GB data segment) Threads: 19 ``` ## Symptoms 1. Gradual memory consumption over ~30 minutes 2. Virtual memory peaked at **129GB** (8x available physical RAM) 3. System became completely unresponsive 4. No kernel panic or OOM killer activation - just a hard freeze 5. No swap usage (swap

Posted by nenrightld-ux on Nov 9, 2025, 5:43 PM

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• github (Sysadmin)

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